The .bash_profile
is one of the startup files used by bash shell to set up the shell configuration.
In some systems, we may not find the file .bash_profile
. In such cases, the shell looks for the file .profile
.
We can also create the file .bash_profile
and define functions or environment variables in it.
We can use the syntax below to reload the .bash_profile
.
. ~/.bash_profile
Let's look at an example of this.
#move to directorycd ~/#create bash profiletouch .bash_profile#write into bash profile filecat > .bash_profile <<- EOMecho "Bash Profile execution starts.."URL="https://www.educative.io/"echo "Bash Profile execution stops.."EOM#reload the bash profile. ~/.bash_profile
In the code snippet above:
.bash_profile
since it is not available in this system..bash_profile
file..bash_profile
file using the command . ~/.bash_profile
.After executing the terminal, we can see that the bash profile is reloaded. We can use echo $URL
to print the environment variable value that we defined in the .bash_profile
file.